The dialectic between historical investigation and contemporary political concerns is perhaps nowhere more obvious than in Roman historiography. One would thus expect our contemporary historiography to parallel the breakdown of the post-1945 political consensus and a return to authoritarian and populist governments: most obviously, we are now more interested in Roman emperors and their precursors at the end of the Republic. The seeming collapse in the hegemony of liberalism as a political and historiographical mode poses a challenge to contemporary historians, particularly if we wish to maintain the legacy of engagement between political thought and Roman history that stretches back at least as far as Machiavelli.
These three volumes are all concerned with the representation and reception of emperors. What links them is a concern with the anxieties consequent on the extraordinary concentration of power in the hands of an individual. Whereas modern and early modern monarchic regimes were presented as natural or traditional manifestations of the political community, Roman emperors were irruptions into a long-established political culture of citizen government. Despite the model of a civilis princeps, the imperial concentration of sovereign authority could not be normalised or easily tied to political or social convention. Such abnormality provoked representations and behaviours that explored the transgressive possibilities of such power, particularly its potential to revoke citizen rights and norms, and inspired a cultic devotion that emphasised the exceptionality of the autocrat and the autocrat’s family.
Davenport and Malik bring together ten essays on imperial representations, with introduction and epilogue. These range from Ash’s study of imperial encroachments into social space in the literary representation of Tiberius and Cowan’s discussion of imperial fathers and sons through Strazdin’s exploration of Herodes Atticus’ depictions of the Antonines to late antique popular representations of the emperor (Grig), Theodosius I as a religious and military figure (McEvoy), Jordanes’ political thought, and Procopius’ hostility to Justinian and Thedora (Carlà-Uhink). In the reception studies segment, essays cover Biondo Flavio’s Humanist response to the imperial legacy (Muecke), Montesquieu (Malik), the novels of Thornton Wilder and John Williams (Scourfield) and the depictions of Charlemagne and Augustus as ‘fathers of Europe’ (Goodman).
There can be no completeness in such a selection, but themes emerge. Scourfield considers how the imaginary and fictional fills gaps in the historical record. For the novelists, the ethical consequence of power provides the agenda. Williams’s novels focus on the corruptions that follow from unquestioned power (notably Stoner). His Augustus and Thornton Wilder’s Ides of March parallel autocratic ethical erosions and the elision from the historical record of alternative voices: the imperial drowns out other perspectives. The fictional restoration of such lost voices is an ethical response to such erasures. Such a methodology is supposedly denied to historians by their positivistic approaches, though Scourfield exaggerates both the positivism of contemporary historians and their inability to excavate potential loci of opposition.
Malik’s study of Montesquieu’s reception of the emperors exemplifies the dialectic between Roman history and contemporary political thought. While the reign of Louis XIV was portrayed by some of his contemporaries as more glorious than the Augustan Age, the Roman experience suggested the incompatibility of Absolutism with citizenship and liberty. Malik’s reading of Montesquieu provides the closest we get in these three books to a theoretical consideration of autocracy. The contemporary Quarrel between the Ancient and the Moderns supposedly pointed to an escape from this Tacitean opposition of empire and liberty in the excellence of French Absolutist monarchy and monarchs. For Machiavelli and neo-Roman political philosophers, Roman history had an exemplary nature that permitted a straightforward transference of the Roman experience to the contemporary context. An escape from the implications of that history of imperial autocracy depended on a differentiation of the Roman and modern or on a positive reading of Roman Absolutism. Consequently, Montesquieu was, as Malik points out, also concerned with the problem of anachronism: Louis’s eulogists might have denied any parallel between contemporary monarchy and the Roman Emperors, but Montesquieu was less convinced.
Montesquieu’s concerns were not universally shared. Muecke shows that Biondo Flavio had little interest in the political implications of autocracy. It was the cultural achievements of the imperial system that impressed him. Nevertheless, some of his near contemporaries, Lorenzo Valla and Leonardo Bruni, concerned themselves with the legality of Caesar’s and Augustus’ undermining of republican systems or thought that moral and social decline were consequent on the formation of the imperial system. Goodman also considers positive receptions of supposed ‘fathers of Europe’, Charlemagne and Augustus. Goodman’s lightning survey of two centuries of reception history lists various appropriations of Augustus to assert a colonial European civilisational superiority. Goodman notes that Augustus’ recent anniversary garnered much less attention than the bimillennial celebrations of his birth, a change which Goodman considers as a move away from European exceptionalism. Yet, there were particular reasons for the scale of the 1932/33 engagement, notably Italian fascist self-identification with Caesar and Augustus, whereas contemporary autocratic regimes may be committed to nationalistic fantasies but are generally studiously dismissive of twentieth-century and Roman parallels.
The studies of the ancient representations stress the problematics of autocratic power. Ash focuses on the discomfort of Tiberius’ presence and the paranoia caused by his absence. The all-powerful individual could not have normal social relations. Cowan explores a similar problem from a different angle: the emperors advertising normative familial relationships through fathers and sons, which might have provided a pathway for people to identify with the imperial family. Similarly, McEvoy shows that the minority regime of Theodosius II sought to advertise its religiosity, military prestige and close family ties, presumably as an attempt to shore up the emperor’s legitimacy. The result was that all sources of authority were captured in the emperor.
Away from the court, Strazdins finds Herodes Atticus assimilating the Antonines as Greek culture heroes in a complex interplay of Roman power and claims to Greek cultural excellence. Atticus’ representation of the emperors can be read as both an attempt at a discursive Greek capture of Roman imperialism and as reflecting a need to accommodate imperial figures in the Greek cultural narrative. Grig points to the pervasive nature of the imperial image, from statues to lamps to steel-yard weights, and across the various regions of empire. Grig suggests that martyr acts were sufficiently generic that the identity of the particular emperor mattered little, but they also show a consciousness of an imperial authority and the power of that authority to martyr.
Despite the passing of centuries, the imperial position continued to cause disquiet into late antiquity. Bjornlie shows that Jordanes associated the Goths with a citizen republic in contrast to imperial corruption. Similarly, Carlà-Uhink rereads Procopius’ treatments of Justinian and Theodora in the Wars and Buildings to argue that the Anecdota was one extreme element in Procopius’ consistent critique of the imperial couple. Such readings associate Procopius and Jordanes with political sensitivities that we would normally associate with the late Republic and early Empire and might encourage us to read classical political and historical thought concerning the autocratic figure as more of a continuity. Overall, these chapters provide a sense of a broad landscape of political thought, ancient and modern, about emperors and autocracy. Although there is considerable diversity in the treatments, the tendency of autocratic power to erode all freedoms and to pervade political cultures, elite and non-elite, provincial and metropolitan, and the risk of imperial corruption are recurring themes.
Despite a concluding four pages (234–7) on the importance of the emperor in modern political philosophy, Christoforou’s Imagining the Roman Emperor positions itself exclusively within the disciplinary frameworks of Roman historiography and particularly in the context of the spat between Fergus Millar and Keith Hopkins. Millar’s polemical claim in The Emperor in the Roman World (31 BC–AD 337) (1977) that ‘the emperor was what the emperor did’ and his disavowal of sociological models was seen as an attack on ‘the Cambridge School’. Keith Hopkins responded with an intemperate review (Journal of Roman Studies 68 (1978), 178–86) which suggested, among many other things, that the emperor was so much more.
This was a polemical debate over how to do history. As with all polemics, it was reductionist. Millar’s own polemical swipe was capacious. It struck out at the biographers, the lawyers and constitutionalists, the prosopographers and the sociologists. Like most reductionist apophthegmata, it is absurd, but a positive reading would see it as a demand for a balanced approach in which due weight is given to the administrative systems of empire.
The Emperor in the Roman World sits within a tradition of administrative and technocratic histories of imperial power. As with late nineteenth-century colonial imaginaries, empire appears as bureaucracy, working through piles of paper and elaborate, nuanced hierarchies, protocols, laws and administrative regularities. The emperor is a senior civil servant. Millar’s brilliant achievement is in detailing, at great length, the administrative sinews of empire. But such a technocratic view of empire requires not seeing so much else, whether we think of colonial or Roman empires. It is also not what our contemporary sources write about.
In retrospect, Emperor in the Roman World looks like an end of a historiographical pathway. As with Millar’s engagement with Republican politics, the bundle of economic, cultural and political systems that we reify as ‘political culture’ repositions our understanding. From studies of religion to reflections on imperial images to studies of systems of morality to inter-elite and provincial networks, to the emergence of a cultural koine, the cultural turn has transformed our understanding. One might note that every essay in the Davenport and Malik collection focuses on political culture. And it is worth noting that the emphasis on political culture has its philosophical roots in responses to the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century from figures such as Gramsci, Arendt, Habermas, Foucault and Levinas. Such responses pointed out the inadequacies of political analyses based on legal, constitutional and administrative systems.
Christoforou’s approach seems at first the mildest of nudges of Millar’s reductionism: ‘My goal is summarised in an alteration of Millar’s famous dictum: whilst it is true that “the emperor was what the emperor did”, it is also apparent that the emperor was what the emperor seemed’ (11). He shares Millar’s ambition of a complete picture of the Emperor and also a refusal to differentiate between emperors: the interest is not in the individual but the institution. But those precepts lead to a potentially much more radical agenda in which Christoforou seeks to uncover the emperor in the thought-world of his subjects.
That task immediately hits a problem of definition: which subjects and whose thought-world? Initially, Christoforou turns to James C. Scott’s notion of hidden transcripts as developed in Domination and the Arts of Resistance (1990). Hidden transcripts, according to Scott, emerge in circumstances of a profoundly fractured relationship to hegemonic ideologies and severe repression of elements of a population, such as within colonialism, extreme economic dependency, or enslavement. Such transcripts are contemptuous responses to the masters’ epistemologies. These are almost always suspected by the masters but can only be artfully represented for fear of retribution.
This promise of a subaltern transcript is supposedly to be fulfilled by the fables and fictions that surrounded the imperial figure. But Christoforou’s view of the political system of the Empire is very different from the context of Scott’s hidden transcripts. He sees the imperial system as integrating these ‘popular’ receptions of the Emperor. Furthermore, he reads Epictetus’ discussion of status differentials in Roman society, which was surely meant to be controversial and extreme, to suggest a normative view that all in Roman society were slaves to the Emperor and thus all were in the subaltern position (19–20).
The next stage of the argument envisages an integration of the subaltern and the hegemonic. The first chapters focus on constitutionalism, law, the arbitration of justice, and euergetism. The final chapters are on wonder tales and jokes about the emperor, and temporality and the emperor. The argument is that the constitutional and legal elements integrated the popular voice since the imperial position was ultimately representative of popular sovereignty. The emperor was therefore customarily governed by law and defended the operation of law even if exempt from law and was bound into systems of generosity even as the empire corruptly extracted wealth from subjugated communities. There was a constructive ambiguity at the heart of the imperial position which inspired comment and discussion across imperial society in a mix of anecdotes, fables, myths, and petitions to the just emperor. The final chapters of Christoforou’s book focus on this imagining, suggesting a broadly coherent, cohesive and consensual view of the imperial position. But consequently, there could be no hidden transcripts and no clearly separated subaltern perspective.
The posthumous publication of Champlin’s essays on Tiberius, including previously unpublished material, provides a very different view of an emperor. Some of these essays are things of beauty, extraordinarily erudite, sensitive, perceptive and stylish. Champlin focuses on Tiberius the intellectual, who spent his time with philosophers and mythographers; he was a connoisseur and patron with a fixation on Rhodian art, and a gastronome, who kept company with Apicius and who knew the price of fish. Champlin also presents Tiberius the monster, sexually exploiting the young on his island retreat, and capable of sudden cruelty and extraordinary violence. But these aspects were not paradoxical; they stem from the practically unlimited concentration of wealth and power in the hands of an individual, power such that he could make his dreams a reality and to dislocate him from any ethical or social norms.
Tiberius lived in a world of myth. His love of Drusus led to a repeated association with the Dioscuri. Champlin traces Tiberius’ association with fire and makes a leap to suggest that he was influenced by Zoroastrian thought and that the emperor himself might be a phoenix who would, one day, return. He exposes Tiberius’ identification with Odysseus, particularly in his pleasure palaces on Capri and near Sperlonga, exploring and explaining the complex association of the sculptural scheme in the cave. Tiberius’ wealth and power enabled his building and inhabiting of a mythic culture. He competed with mythographers in abstruse learning and decorated his palace with dramatic mythic tableaux. If Champlin’s connections seem sometimes tenuous, they are suggestive of a thought-world in which Tiberius can pose as a Dioscorus, as an Odysseus, as a phoenix, and as the hero of his own mythic adventure in his personal pleasure domes
Essays on Apicius and Asellius Sabinus pluck the latter from anecdotal obscurity and establish a social and intellectual context for the former. Champlin associates these Tiberian gourmands with fishing and the production of fish sauce, with cultures of taste, and with familial traditions in such matters. The Apicii are traced through inscriptions and anecdotes that uncovers a family of note in Roman political and cultural life. They are not marginalia in Roman social history thrown up by the extravagance of imperial luxuria, but people closely integrated into the tight-knit and narrow elite of Rome, friends of the emperor whose deaths were of significance. In the case of Asellius, likely starved to death, his fate was a testament to Tiberian cruelty.
The essay on Sejanus brings out yet more complexity in that most problematic of Tiberian figures. In seeing Sejanus as an aristocratic patron of a learned circle, he becomes less a perverse and secretive intrusion into the imperial family and more of a central figure in the cultural and political life of the Tiberian aristocracy. Champlin stresses associations with Servius Tullius and the Aventine and the possibility of Sejanus taking a popular stance, whatever that might mean in the Tiberian period. He represents not so much a road not taken by Tiberius as one closed off in a purge so extensive and brutal to have astonished the historians.
And so we turn to the sex. The references to Tiberius’ sexual habits are easily assimilated into the typical tyrant stories and Champlin suggests that at least one of them, the story of Mallonia, might have been a complete fiction. Yet the story of a powerful man taking young people to his island home for sexual exploitation is unpleasantly familiar. Champlin explores the language of elaborate sex games played in the gardens of the villa with its participants acting out mythological roles. The gossip often punned on Capri and goatish promiscuity. The scandal, he suggests, and what offended Roman sensibilities was the abuse of the free-born, not the sex games themselves. Tiberius on Capri seems a precursor to the sexual predation of Gaius and Nero in Rome and their coercion of the aristocracy.
Christoforou points out that stories circulating around emperors had the qualities of folklore and suggests that these stories had a popular origin, but the world of myth was also the world of the court in which men whose power knew no check played their games and indulged in their whims. If Champlin is right, then we have context for Gaius’ divine associations and his and Nero’s dressing up; Octavian’s banquet of the gods seems less of an experimental slip by the young Octavian and more of a theme in the self-presentation of the powerful: not hidden transcripts but public displays.
Champlin’s Tiberius shows the ethical erosion consequent to autocratic power. He critiques the historians’ misconceptions and hostile misrepresentations of Tiberius and his court, but there are the stories of sexual abuse, of the starving of former friends, of the laying waste of the circle around Sejanus and of the casual torture of the fisherman unfortunate enough to present Tiberius with a large fish. It is likely that not all the stories were completely true, but it is difficult to think that they do not a represent a truth. The closed and narrow circles in proximity to absolute power were, for any talk of the civilis princeps, faced with a reality that distorted social and ethical norms. People might not have known how to deal with the emperor-god or the precise cultural, theological, legal or constitutional bases of imperial power, but they knew what the emperor was. There is a line that connects Tiberius, Gaius and Nero to Antonine cultural hegemony to Theodosius II’s accumulations of religious and military prestige to Procopius’ demonic Justinian and Theodora and further into the political imaginaries of modernity.
We can, I think, find a subaltern view of the emperor and empire. We can look in the early Christian and Jewish texts, with their discussions of provincial subordination and imperial corruption. The Acta Alexandrinorum, read by Christoforou as evidence of popular trust in the imperial system, end with the murder of the Alexandrian ambassadors. One might find versions of such views in the speeches of about to be defeated barbarians in the historians. Whatever the structural pressures that tended to give emperors a certain generic quality, the identity of the emperor did matter. Philo’s Legatio ad Gaium suggests the particularity of an imperial disposition was important. It also suggests that provincials kept an eye on events and factions at court. The emperor and court mattered to non-elite and provincial populations because the emperor could do extraordinary things without restraint. That was not a disguised feature of the imperial system, but a central element of its political culture and understood by everyone. There was no residue of popular sovereignty in a political culture dominated by a narrow, contained and super-wealthy elite. Any civility on the part of an emperor was a concession to those around him. The emperor was not just what he did or how he seemed, but what he could do. That concentration of power shaped political, cultural and moral norms, not just of the emperor but of those who surrounded him. It is an all too familiar story and one which should encourage us to take the emperor seriously as a model of autocratic power for our contemporary world.
